There is no question that this country's total waste dilemma will continue well into the twenty-first century. Fundamental advances, new discoveries, and technological developments in pollution control have not kept pace with our nation's needs for environmental management. The United States produces roughly 700,000 tons of hazardous waste each day, has identified more than 25,000 potentially dangerous hazardous waste sites across the nation, and has roughly 1,000,000 additional sites that have resulted from leaking underground storage tanks including those used for gasoline storage at local gas and service stations. When coupled with the particularly onerous wastes that are injected to hundreds of deep wells, the tens of thousands of municipal landfills, and the innumerable liquid and gaseous discharges from existing municipal and industrial facilities, the total accumulated environmental debt for the nation easily matches the current federal deficit of more than $2 trillion.
That this environmental debt is not being met is apparent. An annual payout for pollution control of only $90 billion has provided active cleanup of less than 200 sites and complete cleanup of less than 10% of the highest-priority 1200 sites. Public outcry following such disasters as Love Canal, Bhopal, Monongahela, and Valdez focuses attention on the consequences of overlooking pollution control issues. The public is demanding more aggressive cleanup programs and stricter disposal regulations. Yet neither the problem nor the solution belongs solely to the government. In the United States, for example, industry has tended to view pollution control as a cost, an inconvenience that must be resolved, rather than an area worthy of intensive research. The total new plant and equipment expenditures planned for 1988 for this country's non-farm business (i.e., durable and nondurable goods, mining, transportation, utilities, trade and services, and communication) was $477 billion. Only $9 billion of this total, nearly 2%, was planned for pollution abatement. (The percentage of total expenditures for a particular industry can, of course, be significantly greater, or smaller, than the industrial average.) Marginal industries cannot afford these costs; they cannot afford to pay for the environmental debt that they have accumulated.
One result of even reluctant investment in pollution control research and facilities is a reduced ability of U.S. industry to compete in the international marketplace. A contributing factor, of course, is that countries with either no or notably less stringent pollution control regulations (note: Japan has not yet begun to address the hazardous waste issue), provide their industries with a competitive edge over this country's industries, with obvious damaging impact on those that are marginal. And while direct expenditures by U.S. industry for pollution control (e.g., health and environmental management, testing and monitoring, recycle/recovery, and site remediation), was expected to be roughly $10 billion in 1989, the corresponding costs in Western Europe and Japan were about $6.4 billion and $3.6 billion. respectively. Developing nations have little impact on cost estimates at this time, however the pollution control industry can look to these countries as an almost limitless future market. New technologies must be developed which will allow U.S. industry to complete more effectively in the international marketplace and reduce the cost of the environmental debt that has been accumulated by both government and industry.